Tag Archives: social media analysis

Steve Jobs was an innovator, entrepreneur and visionary leader who had an enormous impact on every one of us. He brought warmth and humanity to the world of technology and in the process changed the entire the way we as humans interact with each other. The path he blazed was quickly followed by others and even if you don’t own an Apple product, the computer/tablet/phone you are using is better because of him.

The impact he had on us made his death that much more profound and the reaction on Twitter was immediate and immense. Word spread rapidly, peaking at 50,000 Tweets per minute within 30 minutes. At that point, Tweets about Jobs accounted for almost 25% of all Tweets being sent globally.

Looking at the content of those Tweets, you see expressions of sadness and loss, thanks for everything he did, and a celebration of his genius and talent. All sentiments we felt here at Gnip.

Thank you for everything Steve. The world is a poorer place without you. Rest in peace.

It’s been a volatile time for the markets the last few weeks. Today especially – the Dow closed down 635 points; S&P, -80; NASDAQ, -175. While there’s no shortage of opinions on how/why the market will/will not recover, one thing is for certain – having the right data to make decisions is more important than ever.

Part of the reason for this is that the markets are clamoring for trends – definitive information on stock trends and market sentiment. Which is why it’s exciting to see how our finance clients are using the Gnip realtime social media data feeds. In a time of increased volatility, our hedge fund (and other buy-side) clients are leveraging social media data as a new source of analysis and trend identification. With an ever-growing number of users, and Tweets, per day, Twitter is exploding, and market-leading funds are looking at the data we provide as a way to more accurately tap into the voice of the market. They’re looking at overall trend data from millions of Tweets to predict the sentiment of consumers as well as researching specific securities based on what’s being said about them online.

While the early-adopters of this data have been funds, this type of analysis is available to individuals as well. Check out some start-ups doing incredible things at the intersection of finance and social media:

Centigage provides analytics and intelligence designed to enable financial market participants to use social media in their investment decision-making process

Social media is popular — no surprise there. And as a result, there’s a huge amount of social media data in the world and every day the pool of data grows… not just a little bit, but enormously. For instance, just recently our partner Twitter blogged about their business growth and the numbers are staggering.

This social conversation data is valuable. Someday it will yield insights worth many millions, perhaps billions, of dollars for businesses. But the analyses and insights are only barely beginning to take shape. We hear from social media analytics companies every day and we see lots of interesting applications of this data. So… how can social media data be used? Here’s a partial list of social data applications that I believe will begin to take shape over the next decade or so:

All of these projects can be built on public social media conversation data that’s legally and practically accessible. All of the necessary data is (or is on the roadmap to be) accessible via Gnip. But access to the data is only step one — the next step is building great algorithms and applications to draw insights from that data. We leave that part to our customers.

So, here’s to the analysts who are working with huge social data sets to bring social data analyses and insights to fruition and ultimately make the barrage of public data that surrounds us increasingly useful. Here at Gnip we’re grateful for your efforts and eager to find out what you learn.